The small boy slept beneath the plastic constellations, surrounded by bears and dinosaurs, watched over by two dimensional heroes hanging from the walls. He dreamed of innocent desires and vague fears, and breathed with an easy rhythm. Sometimes people would appear in his dreams, but they never had faces, only soft voices that carried over him like autumn breezes. The boy clutched one of the dinosaurs close to his chest as he slept, and the dinosaur patiently remained still and thought of nothing much.
Each night the boy's grandmother put him to bed, and read him stories from a book. The book had many pages but they were all blank, and the grandmother only pretended to read from it each night. Instead she told her own stories, and the boy never asked why the book never ended. He never asked why the story went backwards then forwards then backwards again, or why sometimes parts of the story were repeated but told differently. The grandmother would sometimes laugh as she read, sometimes she would silently weep. The boy never asked, he just lay there and listened until he fell asleep. Each night after the boy fell asleep the grandmother would shuffle downstairs and sit on the back porch and stare at the plastic constellations.
She would sit and remember the daughter that was the mother, that was gone. And when the grandmother couldn't bear that anymore she would think further back to when she was the daughter, and her mother would cast a shadow on the grass in the backyard in the spring. She would remember the river and the boy next door who smiled and always had sweets to share. She would remember her hair that used to be a shiny and glorious black, "as deep as outer space" her father had said once when they flew kites together. Her hair had flowed behind her as she ran, and she felt like a kite, and her father let her go. But now her hair was gray and almost white and her face was not the face that it had once been. It was not the face that blushed when the man, who was the father of the daughter, that was the mother, had grabbed her hand on the streets in Miraflores.
